Mixtape: Stories and essays about the 1980s

By Simon Castles

In the 1980s there was a kind of magic to the mixtape. They could be anything its creator wanted. The mixtape was like a letter, but it was also a personal soundtrack. You wanted it to say something about you - to express in some abstract way how you felt about the world, life, hopes, dreams and love. This book is like a mixtape because it is a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Apr 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781761095146

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

One Christmas when I was a teenager, my guitar teacher and I gave each other mixtapes. This was a common thing for friends to do in the 1980s, the cassette having become – on the back of the invention of the Sony Walkman and the falling price of boomboxes – the most popular way to listen to and share music.

Cassettes didn’t sound as good as the vinyl that preceded them, nor the compact disc that came after and ended the cassette’s brief moment in the sun. But what the cassette lacked in auditory quality it made up for in a democratic essence. A blank cassette was cheap, back-pocket portable and – after some careful curation at the stereo, or poised over the radio, hitting the record button when a favourite song came on – made to be shared with others. It encouraged a do-it-yourself attitude to music love.

The mixtape my guitar teacher gave me has stayed in my memory for a very specific reason, and that was his decision to follow ‘Panama’ by Van Halen with ‘The Music of the Night’ from the musical Phantom of the Opera. Whatever you think of these two pieces of music, it is doubtful anyone had paired them together like this before, or indeed since. Andrew Lloyd Webber just doesn’t usually follow the guitar heroics of Eddie Van Halen.

But therein lies the magic of the mixtape. They could be or do anything its creator wanted. They were deeply idiosyncratic, and this was true not only in the song selection but in how the card in the cassette case was designed and how the track listing was written out.

As Nick Hornby wrote in the ultimate mixtape novel High Fidelity, ‘To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.’

Anyone who has made a mixtape wanted it to be a good one. Indeed, they wanted it to be the best one ever. The mixtape was like a letter, but it was also of course like a personal soundtrack. You wanted the songs, and the order of the songs, to say something about you; to express something about how you felt – about the world, life, hopes, dreams and love – that maybe you didn’t quite have the words for. You wanted the song choices to somehow express your feelings for you.

This book is called Mixtape because it is a mixture of things, many of them revolving around music. It contains memoir pieces, essays and short stories. Some pieces are long and some are short. There is fact as well as fiction. But the common thread running through them is that they are all, in one way or another, about the ’80s, the last decade before the arrival of personal computers, the internet, emails, mobile phones and text messages.

Like a good mixtape, I hope this book says something real and true about that time.

Part One

MEMOIR

TOTO RECALL

The school choir I was in was broken up by Toto. It began when our choir came under the control of a new teacher, Miss Norman.

Miss Norman was an elfin dynamo in heels, a wearer of a deep red lipstick that would spot and smear across her front teeth when she became excited. She had a new teacher’s enthusiasm combined with a shakiness of voice and manner that suggested she’d ridden the express to breakdown station before, and was ready to hop on again.

Before Miss Norman’s arrival, the choir – all boys, like the school – had primarily sung about God and school spirit. But Miss Norman wanted to shake things up, to make the choir more relevant to the times (the times being the ’80s, though I think Miss Norman would have been happy if we just appeared to exist after the invention of television).

She introduced to the repertoire a doo-wop version of ‘Blue Moon’ and then a Billy Joel song called ‘The Longest Time’. It went well, too. Excited not to be singing about Jesus, we belted out Billy Joel at presentation night as if he was the baddest thing to ever happen to popular music.

The success made Miss Norman giddy – but giddy in a way you knew was a mistake. You hated to see enthusiasm like that at my school, you really did. Crushing enthusiasm was kind of what the school did best. The Latin on the school emblem may have said something about it.

Anyway, Miss Norman decided our next song would be her ‘absolute favourite song in the world’.

That song was ‘Africa’ by Toto. Miss Norman wanted us to hear the song. She pulled the cassette out of her bag and, with a kind of ceremony, slipped it into the music room’s boombox. You could see she had played the tape a lot – it was worn and crusty, and stained, as if with wine and tears.

She played the song several times through. She kept her eyes closed throughout and swayed gently, a smile playing on her lips that strained to something like resignation as the song swelled and dipped. At the line about it taking a lot to drag me away from you, it was as if she was no longer in the room, but somewhere else – a place where drums echoed in the night and men were men.

When she opened her eyes, and saw only us, a bunch of oily, stinky fifteen-year-olds, it must have been crushing. But she handed out the sheet music anyway, stepped to the piano and counted us in.

It’s a curious song, ‘Africa’, which is off Toto’s fourth album, Toto IV. The opening verse features drums in the night (because that’s what happens in Africa), whispers, a woman on a 12.30 flight, and an old man who the narrator goes to for wisdom or melody. It also features a line about wings being lit by the moon and reflecting the stars that are a guide to some kind of redemption. So much going on there. So magic them wings. But it was the second verse that caused the problem, and in particular the line about Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti.

It was my mate Frawls who pointed out the problem. Frawls, unlike the rest of us, understood music and timing and performance. On an average day, he could be heard wandering the school corridors singing snatches of Britten’s War Requiem to himself, happy as Larry.

The rest of us had precious little talent (precious little here being a generous substitute for no). We were accepted into the choir for one reason, and that was a willingness, in a school full of thick-necked rugby players, to stand up and sing Billy Joel a cappella.

‘The line about the mountain has too many syllables in it,’ Frawls said after we had stumbled through the song once. ‘It doesn’t fit the music. There aren’t enough beats for the words.’

Miss Norman looked at Frawls as if he’d said Jesus Christ was a dickwad, and told him he couldn’t be more wrong. She immediately raised her hand and counted us in again. One, two, three, four…

But we believed Frawls – and the more so as the afternoon wore on and we repeatedly failed to sing the line successfully.

We would always start the line confidently, but then find there wasn’t space or time for the Serengeti at the end – and how the hell could there be when the line already included the words Olympus and Kilimanjaro?

Sometimes, we would rush the line’s early words in the hope that this somehow put time in the bank for the latter ones. Other times, we would reach the final word with great assurance, punch out the first syllable, and then realise we were out of time and sort of dribble the rest. Mostly, we just shot out the line – fast, blank